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Heather Wastie writes poems, songs & monologues. This blog began with her oral history project with people who worked in the carpet industry in Kidderminster. Her carpet industry related pieces appear on this blog and in her book http://blackpear.net/authors-and-books/heather-wastie/

Monthly Archives: February 2016

On Saturday 13th February, I performed my piece Idle Women and Judies, commissioned by the Canal & River Trust, at the National Waterways Museum, Ellesmere Port. I included a song and 3 new poems in a 25-minute programme, repeated four times. As usual, I took a book so that people could write down feedback and those comments are reproduced in their entirety below. It’s difficult to get people to write down their thoughts, even when they have made complimentary remarks in person, but I was very pleased with what people did write, and even more pleased that photographer Terasa Newton took some shots of me in full flow. See below for these too.

Having already performed at the Gloucester and Stoke Bruerne Museums (see previous posts), it was good to collaborate with the Canal & River Trust again to share these women’s stories at Ellesmere Port. I’m grateful to them for supporting my work and to Terasa for sending her wonderful images without charge. Here’s a link to her website http://terasanewton.wix.com/tnphotography

The search is ON for Worcestershire’s SIXTH Poet Laureate – could it be you? Enter today! Closing date Friday 25th March 2016.

Fancy a chance at becoming Worcestershire Poet Laureate? The competition to find the Worcestershire Poet Laureate 2016 is NOW OPEN!

If you are a poet or budding poet this could be a great opportunity for you to showcase your work and promote poetry as an art form across the County. The remit of the Worcestershire Poet Laureate is as follows, but is not limited to:

To act as an ambassador for poetry for the County of Worcestershire and to promote poetry as an acceptable art form and form of writing.

To write poems throughout the year as The Poet Laureate for occasions such as, but not limited to: “300th Anniversary of Capability Brown’s birth”, “400th Anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death”, “50 years since England won…

On Thursday night in Cradley Heath in the Black Country, where I grew up, I’m running a drop-in session to investigate whether or not the local dialect is dying out. I’ve been collecting dialect words and phrases by chatting to people, in person and on Facebook, and have been overwhelmed by the number of responses I’ve had.

As part of the Where’s Our Spake Gone? project, I’ve been commissioned by Rights & Equality Sandwell to create new work to be shared at another event in Cradley Heath, on Wednesday 6th April. (See http://ourspake.co.uk/) One thing about dialect is that it’s an oral language, so it’s tricky writing it down. Reading the Facebook comments, I’ve sometimes struggled to interpret the spelling, even though the dialect is familiar, because different people spell the same word in different ways, and there’s no right or wrong way of doing it.

If you’re not from the Black Country, this poem will be difficult to understand. I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible whilst being true to the way it sounds when I perform it, and every time I type it out I change the spelling! I thought about adding translations of some of the words, and will be happy to do that if anyone asks. For the pedants (like me) it’s annoying that many of the apostrophes marking missing letters are the wrong way round but it would take me a while to sort that out. If you’ve ever used WordPress you’ll understand why! Anyway, here’s the poem. See what you make of it. (If you want a translation, some of it appears in plain English in my poem 37 Holly Bush Street https://weavingyarns1.wordpress.com/2016/01/14/wheres-our-spake-gone/)

A week on Saturday I’ll be at the National Waterways Museum performing Idle Women and Judiesand some new poems, all of which tell the stories of women who worked on the canals during World War 2.

In March I’ll be featured poet at Howlin Moseley with a 15 minute set of performance poetry and in July I’ll be presenting an hour-long family show of poetry and music based around my book The Page-Turner’s Dilemma(poetry & tales from behind the music stand) in Evesham.

Cartoon by Jules ~ cartoonist

Right now I’m working on a project about Black Country dialect. It’s called Where’s Our Spake Goneand I’ve been commissioned to work in Cradley Heath which is where I grew up. I’m having a wonderful time collecting together dialect words and phrases so that I can write new pieces to be shared at an event in April. I’ve you’d like to get involved, do come to my drop-in session on Thursday February 11th (see poster below).